We are Number 1 On Creativepool List

On November 3rd, 2014, I finished my career in corporate life, there were a lot of unknowns, but I would blame myself forever if I hadn’t taken that step. I became a freelancer and set up my company. To be frank, I didn’t expect it to be this hard. The Turkish commercial photography market had a tough shell. With my business partner Gökhan, we tried hard to penetrate that market except for very few agencies (thank you, #eyedea); we were unsuccessful. 

Luckily, the world was changing at the time, and we had the luck to jump on that train. 

Creativepool is a social platform for creatives & freelancers like me, and as you can see from the attached graph, I entered their top 25 list in 2018, 3 years after I stepped into this field and had been ranked as number 12, and by the end of 2019, I became the top retoucher. By then, we had started working with Emre Zorer, a highly talented 3D artist who works on 3D designs. As I became number one as a retoucher, I wondered if we could make up number one on 3D, switched our profile to 3D in 2020, and immediately entered the list. The 3D market is very competitive, and there are incredibly talented artists from all around the world. In the next two years, we gradually increased our ranking and stayed number two for almost the whole of 2022 as number two. Yesterday I received a mail from Creativepool, and as the end of the year approaches, we are ranked NUMBER 1! The honest congrats should go to Emre. 

I’m closing my 8th year as a freelancer and independent visual designer. This is the longest time I spent in a single institution (Gemplus/Gemalto was seven years). Special thanks to my wife Hande for supporting me and sharing my anxieties on the difficult days, and my business partners Gökhan Çelem & Emre Zorer for their help and support and for making our business last for eight years.